Here’s one I have on bookmark – and it’s about honesty in special needs families. Much love to Lisa Domican for blogging about this; it’s titled “coming clean about that autism taboo“. It’s about being able to have an ‘off day/month/year’ when it comes to living with special needs. The media loves a feel-good story, but it’s not rainbows and miracles every day and families who live with special needs know that. We look on the bright side, A LOT, but sometimes, heck, you just want a rest. So it’s ok to feel annoyed, angry, upset, frustrated… this is normal. And Lisa’s post is very insightful on the matter.

This one is recent and topical – as a journalist myself, it annoys me no end to see media outlets shout out crap like “person with autism shoots XXX number of people” and “serial killer autistic” and stuff like that. What pissed me off even more recently was an “article” that shouted out that there was a “significant statisical link between mass murder and autism”. But buried in that article was a line that the study was speculative and anecdotal. Uhhhh. My thoughts summed up perfectly here by autism father Stuart Duncan: “Dear news media, this is how you fail the autism community so badly”.

A pretty comprehensive study that covered 2 million children from 1982-2006 (out of which over 14,000 had autism) was undertaken by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, King’s College in London, and Mount Sinai in the United States which states that “Autism risk half genetic, half environmental“. Have a look!